What's Changed In The 50 Years Since Stonewall

From Midnight Raids To Same-Sex Marriage: What's Changed In The 50 Years Since Stonewall

I began my education of LGBT history by reading Martin Duberman’s Stonewall as a high schooler, growing up in New York City in the 1990s. In these pages, I first learned about this galvanizing movement for equal rights when poor street queens, homeless queer teens, fags, dykes, and Latinx, Blacks, and white people resisted.

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It was a hot-humid night on Friday, June 27, 1969, when 200 or so people packed into the mob-owned Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village. Hours after midnight , the NYPD raided the club for the second time that week. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, police kept track of suspected homosexuals, and they regularly raided bars, shut down businesses, seized alcohol and money, and arrested people for not wearing three pieces of clothing appropriate to their gender. Those arrested were imprisoned, and their names were printed in newspapers. They risked public outing, loss of jobs, and forced commitment to mental institutions. People were fed up with the police and with constant social regulation of their bodies and desires.

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It’s said that a stoned drag queen throwing punches or a cross-dressing dyke named Storme DeLarverie, who was hit with a nightstick, may have started it all. But pushback grew and a tactical patrol force was brought in. Over the course of five days, riots, protests, and fires ensued. These events would become known as the Stonewall Riots.

Duberman’s Stonewall tells the stories of the uprising, from the point of view of six people living during that time. Yvonne Flowers, an African American lesbian activist, was one of them. I identified with her. She had stakes in the Civil Rights, Black Power, Women, and LGBT Movements. I found myself drawn into what Flowers speaks about, where you subsume your sex and sexual politics into racial politics. I don’t want this subsumption to continue to ring true. So when I think about Stonewall, and where we’ve come in the 50 years since — and what’s next — it’s not just through the lens of LGBTQ+ rights, but also women’s rights, African American rights, and the rights of all those who are marginalized.

I’ll admit, I can’t tell this timeline straight, because it’s been a starburst of a road and there’s still a ways to go. But as we celebrate Pride this month, it’s important to remember the history — national, global and above all else personal histories — that brought us here.

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1950-60s: Civil Rights and the Start of a Movement

The Stonewall Uprisings was within and alongside a series of actions for recognition and rights. The Civil Rights Movement, which took place predominantly from 1954 to 1968, and lead to the landmark passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, significantly influenced the LGBT— now LGBTQ+ — movement.

In the documentary Brother Outsider, Rustin addresses a group of young activists — with such power and beauty — and says: “Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable. The only weapon we have is our bodies. And we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.”

These words, these protests, and these movements set a template for Stonewall, and the ongoing liberation of LGBTQ+ individuals.

In 1979 I was born and my aunt, previously married to a man, announced her relationship with a woman — a woman with whom she would be with for the next 25 years. Met with intervention and concern from my family, my aunt and her partner remained visible, which modeled for me in my mid-teens, how to be present in and accepting of my sexuality.

Congresswoman Patsy Mink of Hawaii first drafted the Education Amendments, which would later become known as Title IX when it was signed into law in 1972. It’s an important civil rights law that prohibits gender discrimination in federally funded educational programs and activities. Title IX would be challenged over the decades — as we’ve seen with the Trump Administration — but it’s an enduring example of what our government can accomplish on behalf of marginalized groups when it tries.

Also in 1985, gay activist Cleve Jones asked those attending his annual candlelit march to honor the lives of slain San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, to write down the names of people they knew who had succumbed to the disease. During the event, he noticed that the display of these placards looked like a patchwork quilt, and that led him to found the NAMES Project Foundation. On October 11, 1987, during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. with 1,920 panels — larger than a football field — for the 500,000 people who came to visit it and the thousands of people who had been affected by the disease.

My Uncle Butchie died of HIV in 1988 before he could take advantage of AZT. An intravenous drug user, he walked around with a plastic gallon bucket and squeegee and cleaned windshields and store front windows for cash. The sun was clouded that day in the Walt Whitman housing projects as I watched family members enter black limousines from the sixth floor window of my grandmother’s apartment. They were stoic and solemn like crows.

Plantation Lullabies,Me’Shell Ndegeocello’s studio album, debuted on October 19, 1993. She was one of the first first out bisexual hip-hop artists. The songs “Outside Your Door,” “Picture Show,” and “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night),” opened up a sexualized and non-gendered space for new genres of identity to occur, and I rewound and replayed those tracks on my Sony Walkman over and over.

After months of unemployment and part-time jobs in Oakland, California, I scored a project management position with a dance company, and my girlfriend and I registered as domestic partners so she could receive my health and dental benefits. The California domestic partner registry was passed in 1999, and from 2002 to 2012 a series of laws in the state gave domestic partners the ability to use sick leave to care for their partners, rights to inherit without a will, step-parent adoption rights, health care, equal tax treatment, and much more. All of this was accomplished, in part, thanks to the consistent presence of vocal and visible lesbians in the California Assembly and Senate, including Sheila Kuehl, Carole Migden, Christine Kehoe, and Jackie Goldberg.

The L Word aired on Showtime from 2004 to 2009, and its cast included Jennifer Beal, Pam Grier, and Laurel Holloman, who were a part of a community of lesbians and queers in Los Angeles, navigating interwoven relationships, limbs, and plot lines. I loved getting lost in their chart of desires that were similar to my own. The show’s producers and writers received criticism for its lack of relevance and diversity — all valid points — but I must say, The L Word reframed “lesbian,” activated a popular cultural conversation that centered lesbians, and gave lesbianism star appeal. Times were hard, and these were the years of the Great Recession, and The L Word provided a wellspring of distraction.

Two years after that, there’s the deadliest violence against LGBTQ+ people in U.S. history: the Pulse Nightclub Mass Shooting, in Orlando, Florida. Forty-nine people were killed and 53 injured, mostly Latinx.

#WontBeErased started in 2018 as a response to these roll-backs of federal rights protections for transgender people, and the Trump administration’s move to narrowly define gender “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.”

If every step forward is met with two steps back, here’s an onward action for you: On March 13, 2019, Congress was presented with the Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or sex.

Today: The Fight For LGBTQ+ Rights Continues

I certainly didn’t cover all the fights and triumphs for LGBTQ+ rights that have occurred in the 50 years since Stonewall, but I hope this timeline has pointed you in directions for further explorations and deepened your understanding of the historical moment in which you occupy. I believe we are arriving, and that is where we need to be — always active in creating a more equitable and inclusive nation. I say with critical optimism that it is getting better, because I need to dream forth a place where trans youth, such as Blake Brockington and Shelley “Treasure” Hilliard, do not live in fear and disenfranchisement. Projects like the It Gets Better campaign, for example, gives people a sense of a future and encourages us to embrace the past from which we came.